Coming home always instills me with a vague sense of dread. I'm not sure exactly what it is about the place, but I always feel incredibly trapped once I'm here, as though I've been snared and only have time to act as buffer between myself and the inevitable disaster a returning hunter offers. Yet it never actually comes. I'm not sure exactly what has changed since I started coming home from college, but somehow I can relax a lot more recently. Maybe I never had to be tense about the whole experience and I was needlessly making myself so. Who knows.

There's a kind of an angst I always feel when I'm back here. I have so many bad memories of growing up here, and so little to balance it against. Once I escaped the state, it was as if a curse was lifted and I was finally free of whatever problems or ruts I had grown accustomed to. Returning I always feel the vague shadows of those memories tugging at my mind, though never in a really threatening manner. It's just one of those random things which forces a melancholy recollection. In some ways, it puts how much happier I am in Maryland in sharp contrast.

In a mildly less gothic vein, I've finally gotten around to figuring out my new years resolutions. I don't know why I keep up the superstition of setting goals for myself on some arbitrary date. It's just one of those things I do, knowing that it won't alter anything at all, but which I put an inordinate amount of thought in to. For that matter, I think I do it just for the sake of countering the retrospective nature of New Years as a holiday. I really hate the whole "look back" type of thing in celebration. There really are two types of them - those where you are looking forward or just celebrating, and those where you're supposed to be reflective. The former are good holidays since, first, they generally entail presents, and second, they generally permit lots of senseless revalry. I can't stress enough the importance of presents and revalry to a good day. The latter is where you look back at what a disappointment your year has been. If your year hasn't been disappointing, you're either lucky or don't have a strong enough imagination. Either way, why have a holiday which focuses on that?

But whatever. Happy Christ-in-a-heystack day. If you celebrate something else, you're probably going to hash it out in hell for all eternity, so you should probably enjoy the season as well. It's pretty much all you've got before the cold, stale breath of the reaper starts creeping down your spine to deliver you to eternal torment. <3